Messages - leejoreilly

In my experience, Wort WANTS to become beer, and there are few absolutes in brewing. You can make fine beer with minimal concern for sanitation, recipe design, mash times, water chemistry, yeast health, fermentation temperatures, carbonation procedures etc. But each point of increased care and attention adds a few percentage points to your chances of making GREAT beer, and reduces by a few points your chances of disappointment. Sure, you can bag the yeast starter, never use O2 or a stir plate, "sanitize" with tap water, and so on, and still do OK; maybe for a few batches, maybe for a bunch. But I think the odds favor those who take the extra effort along the way.

I'd advise leaving it alone for at least another week. After active fermentation, your yeast needs some time to "clean up" after itself by metabolizing some fermentation by-products. My standard is to never touch my fermenter for at least two weeks, and even longer for bigger beers. And visible activity is a poor indicator of continuing fermentation. After a couple of weeks, check Final Gravity with a hydrometer; it's done when you get the same reading three days apart.

I had some Vermont IPA yeast that I harvested from a batch of 1.080 FG IIPA about seven months ago. I wasn't too confident that it was still viable, but I wanted to use that particular yeast in a smaller (1.060) IPA this week. So I made a starter Sunday, got a nice krausen by Monday, crashed it and pitched it yesterday, and it was bubbling happily within about eight hours.

I did give the sample and the starter a serious sniff test, and I had some freshly harvested 1056 standing by just in case. But it seems to have come through OK. The proof will be in the tasting.

Southeastern Michigan is down around minus-OMG this morning ("Michigan" is from the Native American word for "my ears just froze off), and I plan to brew a nice IPA. But I will show great wisdom by combining two of prehistory's greatest discoveries - "Inside" and "Fire". This combination will provide a warm and toasty kitchen in which to practice the zymurgial arts. If I feel the need to commune with Winter, I'll have a beer and wait for the feeling to pass.

While these are fantastic and very detailed ingredient-oriented books, they don't really focus on the brewing process, especially for a newcomer. There are MANY fine "Intro to Homebrew" sorts of books available; I'd recommend Palmer's "How to Brew" or Papazian's "The Complete Joy of Homebrewing" off the top of my head. Once you feel comfortable with the overall brewing process and understand ingredients in some context, you could plan to read them in this order: Malt, Yeast, Water, Hops. Actually, I suspect you'll jump around between them a lot.

I haven't done much reading and I hope I haven't come off as taking advantage of the folks here! Good suggestion though. I do own The Complete Joy...and can read Palmer's book online. I have a couple of other recipe based books which I can look at as well.

I suggest reading some of those books AND continuing to ask all the questions you want on the forum.

I bought a couple of kegs off a liquor store years ago... yea, probably 'stolen'. I don't feel guilty about it, they were a bit dented up and from budwieser. I didn't hurt any craft brewery in the process. I don't know why there always has to be ethics around buying used kegs... there is so much illegal stuff going on everyday, much much worse than this and we want to accept the guilt of buying a possibly 'stolen' keg... there are bigger threats out there to worry about.

So when I first read this, it bothered me, but I decided not to reply - too easy to sound like I'm moralizing. But it's kept bothering me, so I thought I'd give the EHall the opportunity to better express him/herself on his/her view of ethics, and hoping that his/her post was, perhaps, hastily and inelegantly worded.

EHall, do you really think that it's acceptable to act poorly (unethically), so long as someone else is acting worse? It's okay to steal a little if someone is stealing more? It's okay to rape so long as someone else is committing murder (yeah, that one was a big leap, but it's the same concept)? In my world there "has to be ethics around buying used kegs" because there are ethics around everything we do, to one degree or another. I recognize that some failings are greater than others, but they're still failings, right?

While I can see the attraction of doing it for the sake of doing it, I'm not so sure of it's practical value. I would think it would be difficult to accurately rate the SRM color of the roasted malt (for accurate brewing records), or to duplicate that color in subsequent batches. But it still might be fun to just try.